The Movement Habit

 

    Making a habit is at once super hard and super easy. We automate so much in out lives that we don't even think about it half the time! Every day has a rhythm, a routine. You get up, make coffee, browse Facebook or other site to catch up on your social media, you go to work, eat dinner, and tend to go to the same places. This just makes life more manageable, predictable, and minimizes the mental resources we need to expend on a daily basis.

    What gets complicated, though, is when we try to introduce NEW habits into the mix. I recently did this, myself! I wanted to get more consistent movement practice in my routine, and wanted to go about it in a reasonable, reliable, efficient manner. For a few years now, I have been a follower of Zen Habits, a blog about just such changes! I went out and bought his book. Simply stated, the way to build a new habit is to start small, a minute or two a day, and gradually add in more as you become more successful. Currently, I get up at 5 am and get about an hour of my fundamentals in every morning, more or less, before work. My "trigger" is the alarm clock.

    Some days you do more, some days you do less. Sometimes I get an additional 30 - 60 minutes of movement in the evening, sometimes I don't. The point is to follow the essentials, or the minimum viable habit. But when you're looking at movement, we can look beyond a "workout routine" or determined time set aside for "exercise."

    Gravity is constantly at work on us. How we sit, stand, move, walk, travel through space is ALWAYS a certain kind of training. We might be training in moving and standing well, or we might be training poor postural and movement habits. But to just add a little bit, to add novel movements in to our day, is something that doesn't require a lot of commitment or a lot of thought. Try adding a few deep breaths after brushing your teeth, do a deep squat or a lunge stretch after driving to work, stretch your arms overhead a few times a day at work. Simple things, to keep your body-mind integrated and your awareness turned toward your quality of movement, even a little, during the day.

    If you need an idea, check out my video on shaking and swinging! Simple, silly, and gets you moving! 

 

What We Value

    What we value can be seen as what we spend our energy on, our time on. Internally, we might FEEL like we value an ideal or a cause or a system, but unless we express it it remains an idea. Let's take the case of someone who reads a lot of books about diet, for instance. They can know the ins and outs of particular programs, they can know the nutritional value of foods and what nutrients they have. But unless they spend time on actually preparing the food and following a diet, their time has been spent in gaining knowledge, not in dieting. 

    Similarly, if you are in a relationship with someone, and you think about them all the time, but when you are together you don't talk, or you don't spend time present with them, are you REALLY involved with THEM, or just the IDEA of them, the IDEA of being in a relationship? Are you on your phone on Facebook when your significant other is trying to talk to you? Or are you looking at them because that is what you care about?

    I think we can safely say that we love what we give our attention to. What you care about is what you spend time on- NOW in the present moment. This is one reason I appreciate my movement practice so much- I'm spending time on myself, the physical part of myself, which is the expression of my entire inner world and value system.

    Because I think we can look at how we approach ourselves, or bodies, the same way. Do I care enough about my body to pay attention not only to how it feels, but also to the QUALITY of how it moves? Shouldn't we want to be efficient in the mechanics of our bodies so that the joints and muscles and internal bits work as well as they can for as long as they can? This is an anchor for mindfulness, an anchor to the present.

    I always try to look at these questions in a mirror. How I treat my body and think about my body can be an analogy for how I treat and think about my spouse, my family, my life in general. Am I honest about it, am I appreciative of it, do I like the THING or just the IDEA?

    For me, my movement, my "exercise" is really an exercise in being present with myself, in investigating how I approach the quality of how I move through space, through life, through relationships with the environment, of which others are a part. Yes, that is a clunky sentence! But, I value life by valuing the moment in which I exist, the body in which I exist, and the social sphere in which I am present.